The northern part of the Bay of Bengal is the focus of an intense struggle for dominance because of China’s new Silk Roads, trade routes that are quite different from their historical namesakes. In 2013 China announced a massive infrastructure and transport project originally called One Belt, One Road (OBOR) and now known as the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).

The BRI aims to reconfigure trade flows between Asia, the Middle East, Africa and Europe; 68 countries are involved, and it may cost over $10,000bn (1). It also includes strategic partnerships, often with military overtones. The Indian government regards China’s finance of Indian Ocean ports, such as Gwadar (Pakistan) and Colombo (Sri Lanka), as a strategy of encirclement, the ‘string of pearls’ theory.

The rivalry between China, India, Japan and their allies has been compared to the Great Game, the British and Russian imperial struggle in Central Asia in the 19th century. The competition centres on the meeting point of the southwestern Silk Road land route and the maritime route in the northern part of the Bay of Bengal. One of the main prizes is control of access to the Bay, either from Chittagong, Bangladesh’s main port, or from Myanmar’s Rakhine state, home to its persecuted Rohingya population.

In April 2015 the Bangladeshi government, despite close ties to China, chose a Japanese plan for the construction of a deepwater port at Matarbari in the Cox’s Bazar district, south of Chittagong. The cost is estimated at $4.6bn but the terms are highly favourable: a 30-year loan at 0.1% interest covers 80% of the investment, and the deal includes four coal-fired power stations, a transit terminal for LNG and an industrial corridor with motorways and railways. Though construction on the first 1,200MW power station has begun, no detailed plan is yet available (2).

The Japanese plan was selected in preference to a Chinese one, which would have built a similar port further south at Sonadia; the decision was a setback for the Silk Road (3). The border regions between northeast India and Bangladesh, Myanmar and China lie at the edges of the Himalayas, with chains of steep hills, the Patkai, covered in dense vegetation. Despite the terrain, there were thriving trading networks until the 20th century, when new states established restrictive controls over their still disputed borders. Guerrillas seeking autonomy are still active here, and there is much smuggling and a heavy military presence, often with special powers.

Access from Chittagong

Chittagong and its hinterland have access through its port to the Gulf of Bengal, which has shallow waters along its western (Indian) shores making them less suited to deepwater ports. Deepwater port projects are part of a wider aim to organise trade flows across the region that links southwest China, the eastern Himalayan plateau, northeast India and Myanmar.

Rivalry between China, India, Japan and their allies has been compared to the Great Game in Central Asia in the 19th century

On the Indian side, the Kaladan Multi-Modal Transit Transport Project, based around the Kaladan river, includes a planned motorway linking India, Myanmar and Thailand, but is still under construction and running late. A new corridor from the port of Sittwe in Rakhine state (Myanmar) to the state of Mizoram (India) is also planned, though details are sketchy. Sittwe is near the Chinese-controlled port and free trade zone of Kyaukphyu, as well as the Shwe natural gas deposits, from where gas is piped to China’s Yunnan province. Since May 2017 Yunnan has been receiving crude oil via a pipeline installed despite resistance from local people, especially Shan and Rakhine villagers forced from their homes.

With Myanmar’s support, China’s expansion in the region has overtaken India’s. Japan has scored a victory with its port project in Bangladesh, but that may not be enough to counterbalance Chinese dominance in the Gulf.

All the new trade routes — Chinese, Indian or Japanese — conform to a pattern of corridors, hubs and free trade zones that exclude local people, intensifying conflicts and causing large-scale land seizures. In Bangladesh, Myanmar and Sri Lanka, these mega-projects, steered through by conglomerates in collaboration with the countries that finance and control them, are being implemented with the agreement of local state authorities in which the military have a major role. These collaborations often destabilise local populations, who may lose their homes.

The military play a key role in the transfer of land and ensuring the security of international enclaves on national territory, as happened when the China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC) built its pipeline in Sittwe (4). Developing these huge projects depends on techniques for managing land and people inherited from the British empire, which maintained ethnic and religious divisions to the detriment of minorities and hybrid identities.

In Myanmar, controlling the movement of people and social engineering were the backdrop to the recent brutal treatment and expulsion of the Rohingyas, Muslims whose culture and language are both Rakhine and Bengali (5). Some of their forebears were agricultural labourers who were encouraged or forced to settle in Rakhine by Arakan sovereigns (from the 15th century until 1692 (6)) or by the British after the Arakan kingdom became part of British-ruled India (1824-1947). Today their land has acquired a new value.

This tragedy and the resulting instability have had repercussions on Bangladesh, which was already the world’s most densely populated nation before the arrival of hundreds of thousands of Rohingya refugees. The consequences are significant for everyone in the Chittagong region, particularly people in the hills, where power relations have reversed between Buddhist tribes of Rakhine origin and plains-dwelling Muslims, since Bangladesh’s independence in 1971. Every persecution of Muslim communities in Rakhine state worsens the situation for people of Rakhine origin in Bangladesh.

The army controls the movement of people along all the borders. The need to establish and ensure the security of camps in strategic locations is used to justify exceptional powers over land, and the displacement of villages. This power (like the division of territory) is an inheritance from British colonial rule, as it is in the hills above Chittagong, where the army uses it to resettle people from the plains or appropriate land for private purposes. The exodus of Myanmar’s Rohingyas also increases pressure on tribal peoples, who made up almost all the population in 1947 but are now less than 35%. In neighbouring coastal regions, where there is little industry and the Bengali population is already economically vulnerable, pressure on resources has worsened significantly.

Religious identities

Enforced movements of people and land transfers aggravate tension over religious identities in a region that was religiously and culturally diverse until the mid-20th century. Recent conflicts have provided an additional pretext for militarising the region in the name of border security. Land seizures are both a cause and a consequence of religious violence.

All the new trade routes conform to a pattern of corridors, hubs and free trade zones that exclude local people, intensifying conflicts and causing large-scale land seizures

This is especially acute in Bangladesh, where 66 economic zone projects — 55 public and 11 private — were approved by the government in 2010, many in coastal areas (7). The subdistrict of the island of Moheshkhali near the town of Cox’s Bazar has seven, including those in Dholghata, Ghotibhaga and Sonadia, which are part of the same archipelago. In September 2017 Bangladesh’s government granted 300 hectares of land to Super Petrochemical (Pvt) Ltd, a private Bangladeshi firm, to refine and store propane in Dholghata (8).

Vying for trade routes in the Bay of Bengal

There is large-scale human trafficking in the Cox’s Bazar region, though it mostly goes unreported. Every year between the two harvests, more than 50,000 Bangladeshis and Rohingyas are lured into slavery with the promise of jobs in Malaysia; many are then held to ransom in terrible conditions in Thailand (9).

The trade corridors and free-trade industrial zones will have a detrimental impact on the future of communities living at the intersection of several linguistic groups and political divisions, such as the Rohingyas, the hill people of Chittagong and the economically disadvantaged along the coast. They will also have a serious impact on a fragile ecosystem in which fish are an essential source of nutrition and income for people with few other options.

For now, China, India and Japan are expanding the role of the Bangladeshi and Myanmar armies (10), and of some armed dissident groups pursuing identity-based ideologies, because they want support for their grand plans. This strengthens nationalist feeling at the expense of hybrid cultural and religious identities formed by centuries of land and sea contact in the northern part of the Bay of Bengal. And it weakens the position of those who back a negotiated, political approach to conflict resolution.

Samuel Berthet

Samuel Berthet is a historian and associate professor at Shiv Nadar University, India.